It’s not every day you get to say you’ve had a stroll around a radioactive ghost town. But this year, for my birthday, that’s exactly what I did… and the deserted towns within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone were every bit as hauntingly beautiful as I had imagined.
The Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine sent shock waves across the world when reactor number 4 exploded during a routine test on 26 April 1986. Local inhabitants of Pripyat and other surrounding towns, who were mostly workers at the nuclear plant, were evacuated days after the explosion, promised by authorities they would be away for just a few days. But they were never to set foot back into their homes again.
The tour was organised through getyourguide.co.uk and all shots were taken with my Nikon Z6.